Musical Silence

Musical Silence Musical silence can be one of the most powerful “scoring” devices you can use. It works especially well in scenes where you want the viewer to be pulled into the reality of that scene, especially if it is a very intense scene. Leaving out music in...

The “Pitch Culture”

The “Pitch Culture” Some customers might want you to take part in a so called pitch. This means that you write music for the project or present ideas while one or more other composer(s) do the same and eventually the composer gets picked who fulfills the...

Harmonizing Melodic Key Motifs

Harmonizing Melodic Key Motifs If you have a melody for example in the trumpets (it works in any melodic writing but it is most prominent on brass themes), it creates a very nice colour to harmonize the melody on key motifs or phrases. Coming from all trumpets playing...

Visible Time Codes

Visible Time Code Always ask for working copies of the movie that you score that contain a visible time code in the video. So many things can go wrong regarding the sync of music and movie (e.g. wrong framerates, weird video codec glitches etc.) that you should not...

Stacking Two Triads

Stacking Two Triads A really effective way to create interesting harmonic structures is to stack two triads on top of each other. This procedure is called polychords, bitonal chords or under certain conditions upper structure triads. Depending on what chords you stack...